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Symptom: You schedule a chkdsk before rebooting a Windows machine (can be Windows XP or any flavor of Server 2003, possibly others as well) it appears to run through the chkdsk successfully, then reboots again and continues the cycle, continuously running chkdsks on startup, but never getting up to Windows. Sometimes the Windows splash screen shows, sometimes not.

Power down and cold boot doesn’t change the behavior. Attempting to boot into Safe Mode also fails with the same behavior.

Cause: Unknown, but probably due to a failing chkdsk operation not removing the BootExecute reg value.

After entering the correct data, you MUST unload the Hive. To do so, select MyHive branch, and then in the File menu, choose Unload Hive. It’s important to note that you’ll need to select the MyHive branch first, before unloading it.

Quit BartPE and restart Windows. The machine should now boot up normally, skipping the chkdsk.

If you have WIndows XP SP3 and you try to install the Microsoft hotfix to install the Link Layer Topology Discovery service, you’ll get an immediate error message saying:

“Setup has detected that the Service Pack version of this system is newer than the update you are applying. There is no need to install this update.”

Unfortunately, this may or may not actually be accurate, as the LLTD update is not always installed on computers with XP SP3. As far as I can tell, this is a known bug in SP3, and MS has been slow to release a LLTD update specifically for SP3. In the meantime, here’s how to force the LLTD update to run on SP3:

5. Now type in “LLTD.exe -x:c:\LLTD” (again, minus quotes). This will extract all the files in to a new folder called c:\LLTD.

6. Open that folder with an Explorer window, and there will be another folder inside it called “SP2QFE”. Open that, find the file named “rspndr.sys”, and copy it inside your c:\Windows\system32\drivers directory.

7. Also in the “SP2QFE” folder, find the “rspndr.exe” and copy it inside your c:\Windows\System32 directory.